Walk with me through the quiet power structure behind every routine visit as we trace how policy, profit, and protocol tower over your doctor and what changes when you finally see it.
Welcome everyone. Welcome in. I’m your host, Margaret Jacobson, the Mother Rising, and this is the Yin-care® podcast. We’re continuing the medical indoctrination series. Why the healthcare system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. And if you find this episode supportive or thought provoking, it really helps when you like the episode, share it with a friend, subscribe, and then turn on notifications so you don’t miss out on any parts of this series or any of the other interviews.
These conversations tend to find women and men, right, when they’re quietly praying for a different way. So before we dive into today’s topic, I wanna circle back to the gentle act of sovereignty from last episode. If you remember, I invited you to notice one moment where urgency was used to push a decision.
So just take a breath with me for a moment and just scan back over the last week or two. Did you notice a moment like that? With a doctor, a receptionist, a pharmacist, an insurance rep, or even a family member. What happened inside your body when urgency entered the room? What shifted, if anything, when you simply paused instead of immediately complied?
If you feel comfortable, I would really love if you would share what you noticed. You can share it in the comments on YouTube or rumble, or even just send a note to us through our channels. Even if you didn’t catch a moment in time, that’s okay. You’re still training your awareness. The nervous system sometimes needs a few passes before it’s ready to notice in real time.
One thing that really helps me when I feel urgency is to remember in my body who is in charge. When I ask myself who’s in charge, my answer is, I am. And so for you, who’s in charge? You are, you get to define when something is responded to. This act of acknowledging that you make that decision really allows the body to relax and reframe.
So in our first episode of the series, we named something very directly. The modern healthcare system is not a loving, neutral field that accidentally went off course. It is a system designed to manage populations, generate profit, and maintain control, not to cultivate sovereign self-trust in humans, and it functions very much like a police state.
Constant surveillance, framed as care monitoring, framed as responsibility, compliance, rewarded, and refusal punishment. We also started to imagine something very different, what it might feel like for your body to not be treated as a problem to solve, but as a place to live if imagining peaceful, unmonitored, embodiment felt radical to you, that told us something important about how deep the conditioning goes.
Today we’re going to do something very simple and very powerful. We’re going to map the structure you’ve been living inside of often without even realizing it. Think of this episode as putting the lights on in a room you’ve only ever walked through in the dark. Once you see who actually sits above your doctor, it becomes much harder for shame or gaslighting to work on you.
And I’m going to use this using two pyramids, your sovereign pyramid, the way life is meant to be ordered, and the system’s pyramid, the way power is actually ordered in the medical industrial complex. Let’s start with the world that makes sense. The one your body actually recognizes. Imagine a pyramid with you at the top.
So that’s layer one. Your living, breathing, sensing body, your inner knowing, your spiritual connection, your gut feelings, your, this feels right, this feels wrong. Your intuition right. Those, those signals, that’s your layer one. That’s you. Then there’s layer two, your family or intimate circle. The people who genuinely know you and love you, your partner, your children, close friends, ideally, these are relationships rooted in care, not Control.
And Layer three, community, village Tribe, your circles of support, whether that’s women’s circles, spiritual communities, oh, or men’s circles, friends, neighbors, or online spaces where you feel truly seen. These are people who remind you who you are when you forget. And layer four wise health advisors or practitioners that are independent, this is the rare person who is skilled in their craft, is not beholden to insurance hospital systems or rigid professional politics, and sees their role as counselor, not commander.
They might be a midwife, a Chinese medical care provider, Western herbalist, a naturopathic doctor, body worker, or even a doctor who has stepped outside of corporate structures in this pyramid, if they exist at all, are tools that serve you not masters. You must obey. You are not billable. Okay. You’re not a risk profile.
You are a sovereign human being in relationship with your body, your people, and your wise advisors. So just take a breath and feel how different that template is. It’s very expansive and, and peaceful. It feels like a right aligned order. Now we’re going to flip that whole thing upside down and we’re gonna add a few things on there.
In the medical industrial complex, you are not at the top, you are at the bottom. So let’s build that pyramid layer by layer on the bottom layer is you as the patient. At the very bottom, it’s you. And you’re not a whole human though. You appear as a chart. A set of lab values, a diagnosis code, a member on an insurance plan, a risk category.
And frankly, my favorite, which I love to remind people when they go and into a a clinic or their physician’s office or a hospital, you are a billable item. Your lived experience, your intuition, your spiritual understandings of your body and your path. These are barely in the frame. Okay? And then there’s layer two system bound practitioners above you sit the practitioners who touch your body and your.
Your OB GYNs, your primary care doctors and nurse practitioners, hospital affiliated midwives, physician’s assistants in clinics, sometimes even therapists or other providers who must document in medical systems. Many of these people are kind, caring, and exhausted, but their licenses, their jobs, and often their student loans are tied to staying inside what the system defines as standard of care.
They’re often timed by 10 to 15 minute appointment slots required to check certain boxes in electronic records, graded on compliance metrics, and monitored by their employers for productivity. Their freedom to think creatively is already heavily narrowed before they ever even see you. And then there’s layer three hospitals, clinics, and health systems.
Above those practitioners are the institutions, hospital systems, large group practices. Corporate owned Urgent cares, the legal and risk management departments behind them. This layer decides which services are offered, which forms must be signed, what counts as liability, what machines get bought, and how aggressively to code.
And bill, if you ever felt like your doctor suddenly changed tone when policy got mentioned. This is why they’re bumping into the edges of their cage. And then there’s layer four insurance companies and payers. The next layer up is insurance and payers. And this isn’t the last layer, by the way. Seems like there’s a lot, right?
The next layer up being insurance and payers is in, it includes private insurance companies, employer plans. Medicare, Medicaid and other government payers. These entities decide what gets covered and what doesn’t. Which drugs are on a formulary, how many visits you’re allowed, what hoops you and your doctor must jump through for prior authorization, even though it looks like you are going to see your doctor.
In reality, almost every conversation is happening inside a box drawn by insurance. If something isn’t covered, most practitioners won’t even bring it up as an option, not because they’re evil, but because years of practice have trained them not to waste their time on things that the system has already said no to.
And then there’s layer five professional guilds and licensing bodies above insurance set. The professional organizations and boards such as the A MA, the American Medical Association, and its state affiliates, acog, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, and other specialty colleges. State medical boards and nursing boards, specialty certification boards, these groups define what counts as standard of care, what is considered acceptable practice, what can get a practitioner sued, disciplined, or de licensed.
So when a doctor says, I can’t recommend that. Or we have to do it this way. It’s often not just their opinion, it’s a survival response to guild rules that can end their career. And then there’s layer six government and public health agencies. Above that are the regulatory and public health bodies like the FDA, the Federal Drug Administration, which includes drugs and devices.
The CDC, centers of Disease Control, health and Human Services. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, state health departments and upstream of many of these, the World Health Organization and similar global entities. These bodies approve or deny drugs and devices, issue guidelines and recommendations that quickly become defacto law tie funding to compliance and can pressure hospitals and boards to enforce particular protocols.
By the time their decisions filter down, they show up in your life as required screenings, vaccination schedules, algorithm driven calculators, quality measures your, that your physician’s clinic must hit to stay in good standing and, and then there’s layer seven, industry and capital. And woven through all of this is industry and capital, which includes pharmaceutical companies, medical device man manufacturers, big diagnostic labs, electronic health record vendors.
Private equity firms buying up practices in hospitals. They fund medical education, continuing education dinners, large clinical trials that become the basis of guidelines, lobbying efforts that shape the laws. Everyone else has to live by. So when you walk into an exam room, you’re not just walking into a neutral conversation, you’re walking into a tower of aligned interests that were all designed and funded long before you showed up.
I, so let’s just visit something for a second. Something that’s just a routine screening. Let’s ground this in something that’s ordinary. Like you’re being told you are due for a routine screening. Maybe it’s a mammogram, a colonoscopy, or a yearly pap smear. From your perspective, it looks like my doctor says this is responsible and I should do it.
From the system’s perspective. Here’s what might be happening. Your doctor’s employer is graded on screening rates. Insurance offers incentives when clinics hit certain numbers. Professional organizations have declared these screenings the standard of care, often based on studies funded or influenced by industry.
The electronic health record literally flashes, reminders, and flags your chart as non-compliant. If you don’t schedule it, if you say no, the practitioner may be required to document that you refused. Recommended treatment, which exposes them to liability. If anything ever happens later, none of that is visible to you.
All you hear is you really need to do this. It’s important. It’s just a routine, and if you hesitate, you’re made to feel reckless, irresponsible, or uneducated. This is what it means to be at the bottom of the pyramid. This isn’t about blaming individuals, and I’m gonna say this again because it’s important.
This is not about hating your doctor, your nurse, your midwife, or your friend who works at the hospital. Many of them entered medicine with huge hearts and are suffering under the same system, and feel just as trapped, scared, and disillusioned. What we are naming here today is the architecture, the way power and profit, and let’s underscore profit because all of those things we just mentioned are profit driven incentives.
Okay. And qualifications.
They’re stacked above human beings and then disguised as care. When you can see that you can stop taking every interaction, so personally you can stop thinking something must be wrong with me because I feel crazy, small, shamed in these environments. No. You are having a sane reaction to a coercive structure, and as a side note, you’re having a sane reaction to a coercive structure, which everyone around you is within as well.
That means that this shaming into doing the right thing can be felt as pressure from family and friends as well, and not just when you’re stepping into a medical facility. So let’s start to notice where you stand. I wanna invite you into a very gentle kind of x-ray vision. The next time you are filling out a form, being told something is required, or hearing the words policy, protocol, or standard of care, ask yourself quietly, which layer of the pyramid am I bumping into right now?
Is this my practitioner’s actual belief? Hospital policy, an insurance requirement, a board or agency rule, something that my best friend’s, husband’s, colleagues’, doctor, told them or something that ultimately traces back to industry or public health. You may not know exactly and that’s okay. The point is simply to remember, this interaction is not between me and my doctor.
There are many invisible hands on that steering wheel. So as we close today, I wanna offer a moment of integration, not something to perform perfectly, just a way to let this land in your body. So let’s just. Feel this, where in my medical history can I now see that my choices were already predecided by structures I never consciously consented to.
Maybe it was a birth, a surgery, a diagnosis. A routine screening, dare I say, a vaccine. If you feel called, you might journal about one moment where you now see the pyramid clearly. And, and this is not to blame your past self, but it’s to really honor how much you were navigating without a map. So this week here we have your gentle act of sovereignty for you to ponder between now and the next episode.
So take a few minutes to sketch two pyramids on a piece of paper. On the first draw system pyramid, as you understand it, you at the bottom with the layers we talked about stacked above you on the second. Draw your sovereign pyramid, you at the top. Then family, community, and truly independent, wise advisors beneath.
Put that somewhere. You’ll see it this week. You don’t have to change anything yet. You don’t have to quit your doctor or your insurance. Just let your nervous system register. The difference between I am a billable unit in someone else’s system, and. I am a sovereign being at the center of my own life.
That simple visual can begin to quietly rewire how you show up. If you’d like to share your pyramids or what you noticed, I would love to see it. Feel free to comment or tag us on social media and just some final words. You are not broken. Your body is not the enemy, and your discomfort is not a failure.
It is information. If this episode feels resonant, it really supports this work. When you like the episode, leave a comment, share it with someone you know who’s questioning the system, and subscribe or turn on notifications so you don’t miss the rest of the series. You can find the Yin Care Podcast on YouTube and Rumble Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and definitely stay connected with us over on Instagram at Yin Care or TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble at Yin Care.
Thank you for being willing to see what many are still trained to ignore, for choosing to step more deeply into your own sovereign health creation journey. We are still in the powerful energy of the year of the fire horse. May you stay rooted in the herd and rise wild and free. I’m Margaret Jacobson and this is the Yin-care® Podcast.
I’ll meet you in the next episode and tell then honor your. Celebrate your strength and empower your transformation with your yin care.
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